Friday, November 25, 2016

Ben Shapiro On Steve Bannon and the Alt-Right

By Mike PescaBen Shapiro is a [neo]conservative columnist, former Breitbart editor-at-large, and Never Trump–er who’s now facing anti-Semitic threats from the alt-right. On The Gist, he spoke with Mike Pesca about Donald Trump’s election and what Steve Bannon really means for this country. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Is Steve Bannon an anti-Semite?

No, I have no evidence that Steve’s an anti-Semite. I think Steve’s a very, very power-hungry dude who’s willing to use anybody and anything in order to get ahead, and that includes making common cause with the racist, anti-Semitic alt-right.

Advertisement

No, I have no evidence that Steve’s an anti-Semite. I think Steve’s a very, very power-hungry dude who’s willing to use anybody and anything in order to get ahead, and that includes making common cause with the racist, anti-Semitic alt-right.

Is that anti-Semitism?

I want to be careful about attributing personal anti-Semitism to him. I will say that it is appeasement of anti-Semitism, which in my book is certainly not a good thing.

So whatever he has in his heart, he countenances it for either political or media gain.

He certainly did with the alt-right, for sure. And that doesn’t mean that Breitbartitself has been anti-Israel—it hasn’t been. It’s a very right-wing site when it comes to Israel. It also doesn’t mean that Jews who work there, like Joel Pollak for example, have been discriminated against, because they’ll say they haven’t, and I wasn’t when I was working there.* What it does mean is that he allowed the site to be taken over and used by a bunch of alt-right people who are not fond of Jews, are not fond of minorities.

Is this basically the comments section? I have heard him talk about how important it was to let the comments bubble up and drive the direction of the site.

I’m talking about that. I’m also talking about the relationship that he’s had with some of the popularizers of the alt-right, people who wouldn’t consider themselves overtly alt-right but have made a big deal out of providing popular appeal to it. People like Milo Yiannopoulos or the folks who they call the Meme Team who traffic in alt-rightness.

For folks who don’t know what the alt-right is, it might be worthwhile to just sort of start at the beginning and talk about what the alt-right is—because there are a lot of these various definitions floating around, nearly all of which are wrong.

Basically, the alt-right is a group of thinkers who believe that Western civilization is inseparable from European ethnicity—which is racist, obviously. It’s people who believe that if Western civilization were to take in too many people of different colors and different ethnicities and different religions, then that would necessarily involve the interior collapse of Western civilization. As you may notice, this has nothing to do with the Constitution. It has nothing to do with the Declaration of Independence. It has nothing to do actually with Western civilization. The whole principle of Western civilization is that anybody can involve himself or herself in civilized values. That’s not what the alt-right believes—at least its leading thinkers, people like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor and Vox Day. Those kind of folks will openly acknowledge that this is their thought process.

Richard Spencer was just in a big alt-right conference, and his speech ended with a bunch of arm salutes, people yelling “Sieg Heil!” and him winking and quoting in the original German, and criticizing the press using a Nazi phrase.

Yeah, they’re not good people, I think that’s fair to say. Those people have been given this new intellectual veneer by folks like Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo wrote this piece called “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” It was given heavy play over Breitbart, and that piece basically made the case that these are just intellectuals who have made common cause of folks like paleo-conservatives—Pat Buchanan and other folks of that ilk.

What the alt-right is trying to do, and what they’ve been trying to do now ever since Donald Trump came to prominence, is a couple of things. One is they’ve been broadening the definition of alt-right; I just wrote this piece for National Review for the print edition this week. They’ve been trying to broaden the definition of alt-right so they can suck people into believing they’re alt-right even though they don’t believe the central tenets of the alt-right. So they’ll say things like, “Well if you just don’t like Paul Ryan, that means you’re alt-right,” or “If you just like memes, that means that you’re alt-right,” or “If you think that the Republicans are too weak-kneed, that means you’re alt-right.” No, that doesn’t mean that you’re alt-right; it means that you’re not an establishment Republican. I’m not a big Paul Ryan fan, per se, but that doesn’t make me alt-right. I’m their No. 1 target, according to the Anti-Defamation League, this year.

So they’ve tried to broaden the definition so they can suck people into believing they’re alt-right, and then make themselves seem indispensable by saying, “Look at all these alt-right people. They’re all out here, and if the Republican Party pushes them to the side, then they’re going to pay an electoral price for that.” And then you have people winking and nodding at them because they think they’re an important constituency. So it’s a couple-step process, and glomming onto Trump has been part of that because Trump, I don’t think, is alt-right. I don’t think that Trump is particularly racist. I think he’s an ignoramus. I think that more than anything, Trump is willing to pay heed to and wink at anybody who provides him even a shred of good coverage. So if the alt-right, which worships at the altar of Trump—if they provide him good coverage, he’s willing to wink and nod at them and not wreck them.

How much does Steve Bannon subscribe to those notions of European centrism? At what point will he stop?

9 comments:

"Basically, the alt-right is a group of thinkers who believe that Western civilization is inseparable from European ethnicity—which is racist, obviously."

Yea, so racist to say that the people who created the Western world, and have shown to be the only ones willing to uphold it is "racist".

How has this proposition nation/anyone can be Western thing working out, where the vast majority that we import here vote directly against Western values and for progressives who actively seek to destroy it?

And what was the "genetic ethnicity" of the "western" folks who taught entire generations of "leaders" from the "third world" in "western" schools the glories of fiat funny money banks, central economic planning, Keynesian stimulus and democratic socialism? And installed vicious bloodthirsty dictators wherever the "little people" didn't toe the line?

Cuck to Cuck - (((Ben Shapiro))) supercucks for David French, one-time standard bearer for the William Kristol virtual party:

“For folks who don’t know what the alt-right is, it might be worthwhile to just sort of start at the beginning and talk about what the alt-right is—because there are a lot of these various definitions floating around, nearly all of which are wrong.

Basically, the alt-right is a group of thinkers who believe that Western civilization is inseparable from European ethnicity—which is racist, obviously. It’s people who believe that if Western civilization were to take in too many people of different colors and different ethnicities and different religions, then that would necessarily involve the interior collapse of Western civilization.”

The fact that (((Ben))) asserts that the idea that "anybody can involve himself or herself in civilized values" is "the whole principle of Western civilization" is one of the most shamelessly dishonest things I have ever heard a self-styled conservative say.

As for the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they are latter-day consequences of Western civilization, the most certainly do not define it. Moreover, the Constitution was written specifically to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", not for immigrants, foreigners, or "the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions".

Apparently (((Ben))) is not content that his forebears have attempted to redefine America, American, and Posterity, now he is attempting to redefine Western civilization as something that is non-European. Conservatives, is this really someone you are willing to accept as a conservative spokesman?

Source material: While death rates related to drugs, alcohol and suicides have risen for middle-aged whites across the board, the largest surge are seen among those with the least education. A shock rise in mortality rates for middle-aged, white Americans has been driven by a rise in suicides, drug and alcohol poisonings and liver disease. In 2011, poisonings overtook lung cancer as a leading cause of death in this group and suicides is poised to do so, Princeton researchers said For those with a high school degree or less, deaths caused by drug and alcohol poisoning rose four fold, suicides increased by 81 per cent, and deaths caused by liver disease and cirrhosis jumped 50 per cent.

All-cause mortality rose by 22 per cent for this least-educated group. Among those with some college education, researchers noted little change in overall death rates. While among those people who achieved a bachelor's degree or higher, death rates fell.

Scientific analysis of this from Vox Day:

FREE TRADE KILLS - - As if the costs of free trade weren't already high enough, some researchers have determined that free trade, specifically with China, is literally killing more white working-class Americans than guns and traffic combined.

******

Free trade was already dead from an economic and nationalist perspective. This should make it clear that there is no longer a moral case for free trade. It is both deeply inequitable and deplorably immoral; it is simply another form of the historical predation of the elite upon the peasantry. And it is, therefore, a significant and growing factor in the cliodynamical stresses that are leading towards the ultimate dissolution of the United States.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/11/free-trade-kills.html

The wars, the fiat funny money booms and busts, the unpayable government debt, the drug war, the .5% non-market interest rates, the government schools and ubiquitous laws against housing discrimination (which precludes the avoidance of violent criminals) had nothing to do with it. The actual folks who decided to remain uneducated and who took lots of drugs are completely blameless in all this.

In fact, this is all the fault of crazed libertarians who have been SO EFFECTIVE in controlling the U.S. government and enforcing their traitorous regime of actual FREE TRADE in goods and anti-western foreigners!

Just because someone quotes Ben Shapiro and/or Marco Rubio saying something intelligent about a) The Alt Righties; and/or b) the mass murderer Castro and his western groupies, this does not make that someone a Neocon. However, when an alt-rightie or a Neocon loves the state and thinks in terms of collectives and not individuals, we have a shade or two of socialism.